7 uses cases where we do not recommend WordPress
What is the difference between website and web application from a WordPress standpoint?
A website is just a simple informative web presence that can give detailed information about your business and what kind of activities you do. It may not have some advanced user interactivity. It may have photos, text, and multimedia, but usually, it is one-way communication.
The web application is an advanced web presence where you have a high level of interactivity with your audience like user registration, photo upload, membership, events, booking, payments, e-commerce, etc.
WordPress is handy and beneficial for almost all types of websites; however, it is not true in web applications. Your service provider may suggest you use WordPress for your web app, but please make sure that you give required thinking before you agree on that. Based on our experience of more than 20 years with WordPress Development Company in USA, we know that it cannot be used for ‘All’ web applications. There are many use cases where you should avoid using WordPress, especially if you are serious and sure about your growth and scalability.
Here are some of the use-cases that we encountered where WordPress is not the best option.
- When you are anticipating thousands of users
WordPress is a powerful CMS. Its database was designed by keeping a ‘blog’ in mind; it was designed and started as a blogging platform and grew over the years as a CMS. However, when you want to manage many users, you also want to have an optimized database structure (read SQLs) that is sometimes impossible with WordPress, and you may hit the limitations.
2. When you want a rocket-fast website
WordPress is a robust website creation software and works for almost 95% of websites; however, it may not be your right choice if you fall in the other 5%. The non-standard and non-verified plugin ecosystem many times causes performance issues.
The plugin developer often does not write optimum code and database queries, reducing the performance of your web applications. We have come across many clients where we found almost 10K SQLs on a single WordPress page. This is terrible, especially when you cannot use SQL cache effectively.
3. When security is more important
The other major problem with WordPress is that it does not have any coding standard for developing plugins, and lots of ameture developers develop so many plugins.
Those plugins do work well when you have a small number of visitors, but as they are not coded with keeping performance and security in mind, they fail to perform as you grow. Many times WordPress is the main door for hackers to enter into your website.
Due to the non-standard development process and also as WordPress plugins does not have any manual or automated security audits like we have on apple and google store, lots of hackers develop so many plugins that look very useful, but they steal your data.
4. When you have a large e-commerce business
WordPress has many e-commerce plugins that allow you to start an eCommerce website on a meager budget and short time. For example, the woo-commerce plugin is a powerful plugin that provides almost every e-commerce feature out of the box. This can be very useful when you are just starting and trying to test the water.
However, this puts you in a catch; if you work hard and do proper marketing, you may start getting lots of business on your store and may reach a point where you cannot serve many visitors on your website.
The significant and severe problem with the WordPress database is that you cannot easily export your customers’ and order data to other systems.
In addition, WordPress may create challenges in terms of performance (when you have used so many plugins without checking) and security. It requires a good amount of skill and effort. We usually don’t recommend WordPress to our large and medium enterprises customers.
5. When you know about CI and CD
This is a bit technical term, and as a business owner, you may not want to know this; however, this becomes very important as you grow your business and look for automation of your development process; then, you may need to know about Continuous integration and continuous development process.
This process allows you to release new updates quickly (almost daily ) and make your developer super fast.
Unfortunately, due to the legacy code and file structure of WordPress, it is challenging to automate your development process when you are using it. It will require some manual interventions.
It is also very difficult to work with multiple developers on WordPress at the same time and commit the code to any code repository.
6. When you want elasticity and scalability
Let us assume that you have an event website, and you expect thousands of user registration when you open bookings, and on other normal days, you have only a few visitors on your website. What do you do in such a case? Do you provision High-End servers to run 24X7? ? I don’t think this is a wise solution. The modern approach to such cases is autoscale.
All the major cloud providers have autoscaling features that allow you to add as many servers as you may need based on spikes in traffic, CPU load, and other parameters. This does not require you to have high-end running servers in advance.
Again, due to legacy file structure, it is challenging to put any WordPress website on autoscale mode, especially if you are doing continuous development. We have done this for a few customers, but that requires advanced cloud infrastructure knowledge and tweaking.
7. When you want automated testing
Almost all the major web applications and products are developed today using automation testing to reduce manual testing and human errors. All modern programming languages support automated testing; even PHP (the language used to develop WordPress) also supports automated testing frameworks. However, again (oops !), the legacy code and file structure do not provide any solid option for testing automation to ensure your code or updates are secured and appropriately tested.
Conclusion:
We have been developing so many WordPress websites and helping all those customers who fall in above categories and feel that they made a wrong decision using WordPress; we allow them to improve their security, performance, and overall user experience by applying some of the secret and advanced techniques that we have developed over the years.
